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Sunday, June 06, 2010

Bletchley Park files to go online (UK)

More than a million Second World War documents are to be made available to the public for the first time. Files from Bletchley Park, the UK's wartime code-breaking headquarters, are to be digitised and put online in a large-scale project expected to take up to five years to complete. Undercover mathematicians and military operatives produced high-level intelligence at the Milton Keynes base during the war, providing crucial assistance to the Allied effort. The work of the Bletchley Park staff, which included cracking supposedly unbreakable German codes generated by the Enigma and Lorenz machines, has been credited with curtailing the length of the war by up to two years. The Bletchley archive currently exists entirely in paper format and much of it is difficult to view, making it inaccessible to the general public. Until now, only limited access to the archive has been granted to academics and educators under strict supervision